Watching My Mom Go Black -

The first sign was the silence.

“Don’t,” she whispered. Her voice was gravel. “The light hurts.”

Not a peaceful quiet. The kind that fills a room after a slammed door. She started staring at the TV after the news went off, watching the static snow. I’d catch her in the hallway at 3 a.m., not sleepwalking, just standing , as if she’d forgotten the geography of her own home.

And I realized: she wasn't becoming a villain. She wasn't becoming evil. She was becoming void . Depression had bleached her of spectrum, leeched every wavelength until only the absence remained. Watching My Mom Go Black

“I’m still here, Mom,” I said.

I started noticing the clothes. All black. Not mourning black, but erasure black. The purple blouse I loved? Gone. The floral dress she wore to my graduation? Buried in a trash bag on the curb. She said color "screamed." She preferred the quiet of ash.

Her laugh—once a brass section—turned to charcoal. Brittle. If you touched it, it would crumble into dust. The first sign was the silence

I sat next to her in the dark. I took her cold hand—once the color of sand, now the color of slate.

She used to be yellow—the good kind. The yellow of lemon zest, of morning eggs, of the sun through the kitchen blinds as she hummed Stevie Wonder off-key. Her hands were the color of warm sand then, always moving, braiding my hair or tapping the counter to a rhythm only she could hear.

She turned her head slowly. For one second—just one—I saw a flicker of cobalt blue in her iris. A tiny, stubborn pixel of the woman who taught me how to name every color in the crayon box. “The light hurts

Then her eyes went first. The light in them didn't fade; it retreated . Like an animal backing into a cave. She looked at me, but she looked through me, searching for a little girl who no longer existed.

It didn’t happen all at once. Not like a blown fuse or a curtain drop. It was more like a slow-developing photograph, but in reverse: the color draining from the edges, then the middle, until only shadows remained.

So now I sit with her in the dark. I don’t turn on the light. I just hold on, hoping that somewhere deep in the void, she remembers that even black is a color. And that even in the longest eclipse, the sun is still spinning somewhere behind it.

One Tuesday, I found her sitting in the dark living room, blinds drawn. Not crying. Just absorbing . The shadows from the streetlight outside crawled up her arms like vines. I turned on the lamp.